


Center of Gravity

by eluna



Series: Subvert All The Tropes [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Aromantic Dean Winchester, Background Rowena MacLeod, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Genderswap, Internalized Sexism, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), POV Dean Winchester, Post-Episode: s13e12 Various & Sundry Villains, Pre-Episode: s13e13 Devil's Bargain, Season/Series 13, Sexism, Temporarily Female Sam Winchester, Trope Subversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 01:38:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18511297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: Dean gapes. For a split second, he thinks a hot chick has somehow killed his brother and tried to take his place, but then he remembers that they just wrapped up a witch hunt, and Sam could have accidentally gotten into all sorts of powders or potions at the witches’ house yesterday that might have done this to him. Sam still resembles his male self, still has the same eyes and pout and cheekbones, but his face shape is softer, his chin has receded, his nose is more slender, and the thought crosses Dean’s mind that Sam was maybe meant to be born a girl because he’s beautiful.





	Center of Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> Subverted genderswap. It's been a prolific week \o/

Dean wakes to the sound of muffled shouting, and he’s on his feet with his knife in his hand an instant later, hardwired to defend his brother even without knowing any of the details. “Sam?” he calls out, bolting toward the door of the motel bathroom and jiggling the handle. It doesn’t give. “Sammy?”

“I’m fine,” comes a voice from inside the bathroom, only it doesn’t sound like Sam’s voice, exactly; it has the same timbre, but it’s higher pitched to the point that it’s barely recognizable.

“Really? Because you don’t sound fine.”

“It’s… well… don’t freak out, okay? It’s me.” And a moment later, Sam unlocks the door.

Dean gapes. For a split second, he thinks a hot chick has somehow killed his brother and tried to take his place, but then he remembers that they just wrapped up a witch hunt, and Sam could have accidentally gotten into all sorts of powders or potions at the witches’ house yesterday that might have done this to him. Sam still resembles his male self, still has the same eyes and pout and cheekbones, but his face shape is softer, his chin has receded, his nose is more slender, and the thought crosses Dean’s mind that Sam was maybe meant to be born a girl because he’s _beautiful_. Then the moment passes, and Dean snickers.

“What’s the difference?” he snarks.

Sammy scowls and slams the door in Dean’s face.

“Oh, come on, don’t be like that, I was kidding! Lemme in.”

“No!”

“I was just pulling your chain, Sammy. You’re much prettier as a girl, I promise.”

“Shut up!”

Dean rests his head against the door and knocks on it gently. “Look, we’ll figure this out together, all right? Let’s just go get some breakfast, we’ll call Rowena—”

“ _I’ll_ call Rowena. You go on without me; I’m not hungry.”

“Okay,” says Dean. “Okay. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

While he scarfs down his food at the diner, he decides that Sam is most certainly still his brother, and a man, until which time that Sammy asks Dean to start calling him a “her.” If it were Dean, though, getting whammied into the wrong body overnight wouldn’t change the way he thought about his gender, and he figures it’s probably the same for Sam. It’s not going to stop Dean from making incessant girl jokes, but he can at least keep calling Sam a “him” the rest of the time.

He doesn’t know why he’s so thrown by how goddamn attractive Sam is as a woman. Sure, Sammy’s always been a good-looking dude—it’s not like Dean was ever oblivious to that—but Dean’s never been attracted to other men sexually, let alone his own brother. But now Sam’s not just another man, and he looks different enough that the “incest” synapse in Dean’s brain isn’t firing, and the whole situation is messing with his head.

When he leaves the diner and gets back to the motel room, he finds Sam pacing its length with his hands at his temples. He looks to be almost a foot shorter as a woman; he’s swimming in his shirts, and his belt doesn’t appear to have tight enough notches to hold in place his jeans, which are practically falling off of him. “I got a hold of Rowena,” Sam says in greeting, gratefully accepting the coffee cup Dean hands him. “She said the effect should be temporary, but there’s nothing we can do to reverse it in the meantime.”

“How temporary is temporary?” asks Dean.

“Anywhere from one to three months. The good news is that it’s only cosmetic changes, nothing internal, so I won’t start menstruating and I can’t get pregnant.”

Dean immediately pictures bending Sam over and getting his dick into Sammy’s vagina, and then immediately feels sickened with himself. What is _wrong_ with him? “That sounds super helpful for all the sex you’re clearly planning on having.”

“Shut up. Period cramps are no joke, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I think we should hit up a Salvation Army or something and get you some clothes that actually fit you. You can’t show up looking like this to a knife fight—you’ll trip over your own feet and kill us both. And we’ll need to get you a pantsuit or something you can use to replace your fed suit.”

Sam chews on his lip, frowning. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

After they get to the nearest thrift store, Sam gives Dean a funny look when Dean starts to head for the women’s clothing section. “That’s what’s going to fit you now, isn’t it?” says Dean, nonplussed.

“I’ll just get extra-small men’s stuff,” Sammy says. “Well, except for the fed clothes.”

Dean blinks. “Right. Sure, yeah.”

There isn’t a lot of extra-small men’s clothing to be found at all in the warehouse-sized Goodwill, but Sam manages to find about a dozen T-shirts and flannels that are only slightly oversized on him, giving the impression (Dean thinks) that Sam’s borrowing clothes from a boyfriend or some other male figure. The overall look doesn’t do anything to tamp down Dean’s libido, especially when Sam can’t find any jeans that fit him and is forced to venture into the women’s section to find a few pairs. They top it all off with a few blouses and skirts and a pair of pantyhose for fed cases, and then Sam insists that Dean go wait in the car while he picks out bras, socks, and underwear.

They spend the rest of the day driving, then hustle some serious cash that night when a few tipsy frat boys think that Sam as a girl is to be underestimated. By the time they make it to their new motel for the night, Dean is drunk and happy, leaning heavily on his sober brother’s shoulder.

“Hey, Samantha, come here,” says Dean after Sam deposits him on one of the beds.

“It’s still Sam,” says Sammy thinly.

“Okay, Samantha. Just come here.”

Rolling his eyes, Sam sits on the mattress next to Dean and watches him patiently. This close up, Dean can notice that Sam smells different—fruity—and he breathes in deeply. “I love you,” Dean says, and he grins.

Sam looks taken aback, then rolls his eyes again. “Yeah, I love you, too, Dean.”

“No, I—” and Dean falls forward and curls up in Sammy’s lap, letting himself fall fast asleep.

* * *

The trouble starts when they get back to the Bunker and head down for target practice. Sam’s bullets miss the head and heart one after another. “God _damn_ it!” he shrieks finally, and Dean lays down his own gun and comes over to peek at Sam’s entirely intact paper target.

Dean winces. “Having an off day?”

“My center of gravity is all fucked up. It might take me a while to figure out how to correct for this.”

“Try it again,” says Dean, and Sam aims and fires and misses, twice. “Okay. Aim again, but don’t shoot.”

Sam huffs but does as he’s told, and Dean steps behind him and places his hands on Sam’s waist and shoulders, subtly adjusting his posture. He takes a deep breath of Sam’s hair—short for a woman’s—and curses himself silently. “Okay, try now.”

Sam shoots. The bullet lodges itself in the target’s left shoulder. “Progress,” says Dean evenly when Sammy starts to swear again.

Sam keeps at it for most of the day, only emerging when Dean has already put on his pajamas and kicked his feet up onto the war room table. “Well, I can at least hit the target every time now, but my bullets still aren’t landing where I need them to land.”

“You’ll get there,” says Dean. He’s (more than) a little tipsy, and he trips over his own feet a little as he stands up, walks over to Sam, and claps a hand awkwardly on his shoulder. Sam is so much _smaller_ than Dean is now, and Dean keeps flashing back to when they were kids and he was always so far ahead of Sam developmentally, except back then Sam never had curves or went bra shopping. God, he needs to get a grip.

“Why do you keep touching me?” asks Sam now, and Dean honest to god blushes.

“Sorry,” he says gruffly, straightening up. “I’ll just… I’ll…”

His hand migrates from Sam’s shoulder up to his cheek, and he rubs the calloused pad of his thumb over the smooth skin and slips his fingers back into Sam’s hair. It’s still chin-length like it was before, but now frames Sammy’s face more like a bob cut. “Sorry,” Dean says again, and he pulls away and hobbles out of the war room toward the bedrooms.

He’s got to do better at keeping his hands to himself, he tells himself sternly as he lies awake for minutes on end, thinking about blue jeans and the smell of Sam’s hair. He’ll keep his distance. He’ll stop drinking. He’ll…

The next morning, Dean sleeps late—too late—and wakes abruptly when Sammy knocks sharply on his door and barges right in. “I need your help,” Sam says flatly.

“Wha’sup?” mumbles Dean. He rolls onto his stomach and buries his head beneath his pillow.

“I need to train with you. If I can’t shoot a gun, I probably need to practice my hand-to-hand combat, too.”

 _That_ wakes Dean up. So much for staying away from Sammy until the curse breaks. “Yeah, just give me—give me ten minutes,” he says, and Sam huffs audibly but backs out of the room, snapping the door shut behind him.

He jacks off quickly and perfunctorily, thinking pointedly about Japanese cartoon porn and not about the way he imagines female Sammy would look underneath him. Even though he sort of really hates himself for doing it, he figures that taking care of the problem _before_ he and Sam get sweaty and physical together might be smart as a preventative measure.

They start out just wrestling, leaving the knives to the side until Sam can regain some control over his body, and for the first time in years and years, it’s actually pretty easy for Dean to get the jump on him. “You’re right,” says Dean, “you’re really struggling with your center of gravity.”

“It’s not just my center of gravity, it’s dysphoria,” says Sammy, crossing his arms.

Dean blinks. “Dys-what?”

“It’s like—like how there’s just empty space where my groin should be, and my boobs and hips keep getting in the way and screwing up my balance because it feels like they shouldn’t be there. Stuff like that.”

“That sounds like a bitch,” says Dean, falling back into position and trying not to think too hard about Sammy’s boobs.

“I’ll beat it,” says Sam. “I have to.”

But it becomes apparent over the next few days that it’s going to take more than a couple of training sessions for Sam to relearn the way his body now works. Dean spends more time masturbating than he has since he was a teenager; he’s got no idea how he’s managing to hide it from Sammy, but Sam doesn’t appear to realize what’s up, or at least if he does realize what’s up he isn’t talking. Dean just wants to work a case with his brother and get back to normal, but even though Sam seems to want that too, Dean knows better than to try when Sam’s so far off his game.

“I’m _ready_!” Sam insists once they’re into the second week of this, brandishing a newspaper in the air at Dean like the fishy obituary inside it holds some kind of evidence of Sam’s hunting prowess.

“You’re _not_ ,” says Dean firmly. “I’m not bringing you with me into the field just to get you killed by some rugaru or something.”

“I’m _not_ going to get killed. You’re just saying that because I’m a woman now and you think women are _weak_ —”

“For god’s sake, Sam, you’re not _weak_ , but your whole body reorganized itself overnight and you’re still figuring out how to use it now. It’s my job to _protect_ you, even from yourself.”

“Stop being such a chauvinist!”

“I’m not—have you heard a word I’m saying?” says Dean impatiently. “ _You_ stop being emotional!”

“You’re just calling me that because I’m a woman!”

“No, I’m not. I call you emotional all the time.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Whatever. I need a drink.”

The thought of Sam venturing out to a bar alone where anyone could attack him and he hasn’t got the acumen to fight them off frightens Dean more than he’d like to admit, and he speaks up right away, “I’ll come with you.”

“ _No_ , you _won’t_. I can handle getting a drink by myself like a big boy, thanks.”

But Sam’s _not_ a big boy anymore, and Dean finds himself waiting up for Sammy in the war room, drinking in spite of his promise to himself. Not for the first time, he curses the fact that it’s likely going to be months before Sam is restored to his old body. They can’t do their job like this—hell, apparently, they can’t get along at all like this—and Dean doesn’t know how he’s supposed to stand feeling this worried about Sam every time he leaves the Bunker at night.

Sam stumbles back inside at half past two in the morning. He’s clearly drunk, Dean is drunk, and there’s absolutely no way that this can end well. “Made it back okay?” says Dean scathingly. “Didn’t get raped on the way out?”

Sammy snarls on his way down the staircase. “You know what, fuck you, Dean. Fuck you and your stupid sexism and your stupid hands—”

“My hands?”

“You keep touching me! And I know you’re just doing it because you think I’m a hot chick and you’re a horndog around hot chicks, but it’s not _fair_. It’s not fair.” So much for Dean’s supposed subtlety. He gets right up into Dean’s personal space, grabbing Dean’s hands and placing them around his neck. “For you, this goes away when I get changed back into a man again. For me, it doesn’t—it doesn’t—it doesn’t,” he trails off in a whisper.

Torn between feeling pleased, flustered, and horrified, Dean slides his hands up from Sammy’s neck into his hair. “I didn’t know,” he says dumbly.

“Yeah, I know you didn’t. I’ve had a lot of practice at keeping it buried.”

Dean doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do, so he tamps down the alcohol and just—holds on. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do about this,” he says earnestly.

Sam doesn’t speak for a long time. “Please,” he says finally. “Please.”

* * *

Dean wakes up the next day with a sick pit of guilt in his stomach before he even remembers why it’s there. He figures it out pretty quickly when he recognizes with an awful jolt Sammy’s walls and bed and naked body next to his, arms snugged up around Dean’s waist and breath hot in Dean’s ear. For a moment, he considers sneaking his way out of the bed and just _fleeing_ , but then Sam’s grip tightens in his sleep and Dean decides that fleeing isn’t an option.

Sammy was right: Dean’s attraction to him _does_ end as soon as the curse breaks, and it’s _not_ fair that Sam will have to live with his feelings for Dean even after Dean’s own feelings dissipate. And Dean’s a giant-ass hypocrite, because as good as it felt to get his dick in Sammy last night, he’s still disgusted with Sam for being attracted to him, just as much as he’s disgusted with himself.

They never should have had sex. It’s obvious to Dean now that the haze of alcohol has burned off of his mind. But he’d asked Sam what he’d wanted, and this was what Sam wanted, at least at the time.

The last thing Dean wants is to talk about this. They’re going to have to talk about this.

“Sam…”

Sammy stirs, slowly at first, and then he bolts upright and tries to escape. Dean reaches over and reels Sam in by the shoulders. “Sammy, stop.”

“Let me go,” Sam huffs.

Dean pauses, chooses his next words carefully. “Do you ever do something really, really selfish, and you wind up really hurting someone you care about? Someone you love more than anything?”

Sam takes a moment to answer, tense and withdrawn where he’s extricated himself from Dean under the covers. “If your goal here is to try and help me get over it, you might want to try a different angle than flattery, because it’s not helping.”

He sighs. “I’m sorry. I really am, Sam. I should have been more careful; I should have…”

“Well, you weren’t,” says Sam, his voice even higher pitched than it already is in girl tones. “I don’t need you to tell me that you’re not going to want this anymore after I change back, so let’s just pretend this never happened, okay?”

“Sammy, we can’t just—”

“We can, and we’re going to. Please don’t make this harder than it already is. Please.”

They spend the day practicing close combat again, and this time, Dean presses up against his little brother’s body and doesn’t have to just imagine what it would feel like naked underneath his own. They don’t talk about it. Sam’s body is taut and hot and sweaty and vibrating with tension as he tries and fails again and again to buck Dean off of him.

“Let’s just—let’s just take a break, okay?” Dean says after a few hours of it, extending a hand to help Sam off the ground. Sam doesn’t take it, hobbling upright and rubbing his hip. “Do some research, see if we can’t find anything new on opening doors to other worlds? Try and get Mom and Jack back?”

“No,” says Sammy vehemently, and then he backpedals, “It’s not that I don’t want to find them, but I—this is something that I have to do. I _have_ to get my body working right.”

“But why? To hunt? You might only have a couple weeks of this left before the spell wears off; I think we can stand to focus on research and not work any cases in the meantime.”

“I need it, Dean. I just… I need it. You don’t know what it’s like not to fit inside your own body.”

Dean looks at him, wonders how weird it felt for Sam to get laid with boobs and a vagina, and his stomach twists with sympathy. “Okay, well, I’m gonna fix lunch and then do some research. You can come with me, or you can stay down here and hit up the punching bag or something. It’s up to you.”

Sammy still insists on spending a few hours a day training (usually alone), trying to rebuild his muscle mass and get used to the new dimensions of his frame, but as the weeks pass, they gradually shift toward spending their time on research—although it proves fruitless as they find nothing in the Men of Letters’ writings and book collection about alternate dimensions, day after day after day. Dean feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin every time Sammy leaves the bunker alone and unprotected, but he tries not to say anything for fear of setting Sam off and fucking up the uneasy peace that they’ve established.

In between bouts of marathon masturbation, Dean tries to reason with himself and find some way that he can want to keep being intimate with Sammy after the spell wears off, but—it’s hard. Dean’s never really understood what the difference is supposed to be between romantic love and platonic friendship, and so the only reason he’s ever had to want to have sex with someone is if he’s sexually attracted to that person. Hell, even in his relationships with Cassie and Lisa, he really saw them both as just close friends with whom he liked having sex. Sammy certainly fits the bill as a close friend—he’s the best friend Dean’s ever had—but Dean doesn’t know if that’s enough for him to be able to stand to keep having sex with him once he’s a guy again. Complicating the matter further is the guilt that Sam is his brother and they _shouldn’t_ be doing _any_ of this, even if it doesn’t feel like incest because Sam doesn’t look like Sam.

At the beginning of the fourth week, Sam is alarmed to find blood in his underwear when he hits the bathroom after a particularly brutal weightlifting session. A phone call to Rowena assures him that spotting is perfectly normal when the spell begins to wear off and that it won’t prove dangerous or even escalate into a full period, although Sam may want to buy some pads to use over the next few days, just to be safe. Sam looks so mortified that Dean offers to pick some up at CVS for him, and he returns home from the shopping trip with a plastic bag and a grin plastered on his face. “I got your pads, Samantha,” he trills at the top of his voice as he descends the staircase into the Bunker. “Time to ride out your last few days of womanhood in authentic—”

He stops short when he catches sight of Sam, who’s sitting at the table looking utterly desolate, his forehead buried in his hands. “Sam?” he asks gently, then adds with a fake laugh, “Is it your moody time of the month?”

“Stop with the gender jokes, Dean. Just fucking stop.”

“Okay, you’re not in the mood. Sorry.”

Sam raises his steely eyes to meet Dean’s. “I’m not just _not in the mood_ , Dean. I’m sick of it. I’ve been sick of it all month, and I don’t want to deal with your sexist crap.”

“My sexist— _I am not a chauvinist_! For the last time!” says Dean. “The reality is that you’re _not_ as strong as you used to be, and people _are_ jackasses who’ll prey on you if you go out at night alone, and just because I’m worried about you—”

“I’m still the same person, Dean! I’m still _me_! I can take care of myself!”

“Maybe you can, but not as well as you used to be able to, Sammy, and you know what? I think it’s pretty sexist of _you_ to think that the differences that make you a woman also make you weak.”

“ _I’m_ sexist? I—it’s been almost a month of training _every_ day, and I _still_ can’t throw you off in combat. Of _course_ I’m weak like this! Of course I can’t stand it! How would you feel if you had these limitations?”

Dean grunts, “I’m not going to apologize for not being the one who got whammied with a genderswap curse.”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

They stare each other down for a long, tense moment, and then Sam sort of crumples and lays his head down on the table, groaning. “I hate this,” he mutters. “I wish I could just go back to before this ever happened.”

“Hey, it’ll be over soon.”

“Yeah, and things are still gonna be weird between us, aren’t they?”

It’s the first time since it happened that Sam has acknowledged their shift to a physical relationship, and Dean has no idea what to say. He blurts out, “Things aren’t weird between us.”

“You won’t touch me at all outside of training,” says Sammy, refusing to look up. “We don’t talk about anything except combat and research. And the way you look at me… it’s like you can’t decide whether you feel guilty or whether you feel disgusted with me.”

Dean has no intention of telling Sam how accurately he’s gauged Dean’s feelings. He sighs. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when you change back, Sammy, but you’ll still be my brother and I’m not going to leave you. Okay? I will never leave you.”

And Sam finally looks back at him, so beautiful with his hair mussed and his lips curved into a pout, and he says, “Yeah, but… it feels like you already have.”


End file.
